A need was identified that required many samples to be comminuted (the grinding of a solid in the presence of a liquid) in an automated high throughput laboratory system. The constraints that this presented included: the ability to load and unload the device with vials using a robot; comminution at the desired scale of 5 to 40 ml; minimal or no clean-up of the system between samples; a mill that could hold more than 10 vials for parallel processing; comminution performance such that a particle size of 1 micron median distribution was obtained within less than 1 hour.
Laboratory milling and comminution systems that are generally available include conventional re-circulating mills, which can only process one sample at a time and need considerable clean up, shaker mills which require vials or well-plates to be clamped into the system and are therefore not ‘robot-friendly’, and planetary ball mills which also require the milling vessels to be clamped into the system, generally operate upon large vessels in the 80 ml to 250 ml range and use vessels that require sample clean-up. If smaller vessels are accommodated in the planetary mills, reducing adapters are used which allow the smaller vessels to be placed centrally in the location of the larger vessel.